When Valve first launched Steam, distributing games over the Internet was still a fairly new idea. Digital distribution has since become a major channel for getting games out there, and so Valve has seen the number of submissions to its store grow at an incredible rate. Having just an in-house team greenlighting new games for Steam was eventually going to become unmanageable, so Valve has decided to get the gaming community involved.

A new system called Steam Greenlight has been announced today to help cope with the sheer number of games vying for a position on Steam. Greenlight enables the community to vote on new games their developers have submitted for approval. Everyone gets a vote, and if a game gets enough backing from the community it will win its place in the Steam Store.

By including gamers, Valve hopes that the best new games will float to the top of the pile and become available through their system much quicker than the old approval process. It should also mean the truly terrible games never even make it in front of someone who gives final approval at Valve, therefore reducing the pressure on them to process every game.

There’s still a few kinks to work out, such as how many votes qualify a game for approval and release. Ultimately that will come down to just how big the Steam Greenlight community turns out to be.

The best way of looking at Steam Greenlight is as a different form of Kickstarter where votes replace cash pledges. If you want to see a game make it to release you vote it up, then encourage your friends to vote for it too.

Valve doesn’t specify if all games have to go through the Steam Greenlight process, but I assume high-profile titles from the major publishers will be able to bypass it. However, some may want to take advantage of Greenlight as a possible marketing tool for some of their smaller or niche games that are currently in development.